Trailer

Review

WORST X-men movie ever (by far).

3/10 Usually plot holes are isolated. This movie was however one giant plothole.

(1) Grandpa

This is what I understood at the end of the movie: Turns out Grandpa is a bad ass who just wanted to magically suck Wolverine's healing powers and live forever. So what he did was (i) Invite Wolverine to Japan; (ii) Fake his own death; (iii) As part of his plan (?) inject a spider onto Wolverine's heart so that he loses his healing powers--What in the world did this achieve for evil Grandpa?; (iv) As part of his plan (?) allow his granddaughter to be subject to multiple assassination attempts, just so that Wolverine will keep following her; (v) Then after leaving a trail of crumbs for Hansel and Gretel, captures his granddaughter, and lures Wolverine to some sort of lair, where his powers can be sucked.

The (?)'s indicate where I am not sure if it was really part of Grandpa's plan or things just worked out this way.

Given the tremendous amount of uncertainty involved in the above plan (e.g. Wolverine might've been killed, in which case no powers to suck; his granddaughter might've been killed, in which case end of story, and Wolverine would've returned to the Yukon to chill out with grizzlies), you'd think there'd been a simpler and cleaner way to do all this. But no.

All this is quite forgivable, compared to other things that went wrong.

(2) Viperwoman

What the hell is motivating her? What does she want? Is she working for herself? Or is she working for Grandpa and if so, why?

How did she inject the spider onto Wolverine's heart? Just by kissing him in the middle of the night? (This was never clarified.)

(3) Japanese Father and Japanese Fiance

OK so it turns out the whole family (except pretty granddaughter) are a bunch of one-dimensional assholes. This is cliched and boring and stupid, but still acceptable if you at least make some effort explaining what exactly was motivating them.

Japanese Father wants to kill his own daughter just because Grandpa willed her everything? (Oh, and this too was part of Grandpa's grand masterplan?)

Japanese Fiance is just some asshole who's engaged to pretty granddaughter (this, BTW, is explained for us gaijin simply by the line that "You're not Japanese, so you won't understand"). He's the minister of justice or something. And he likes to have white hookers in his hotel room. Uh, and what else do we know about him? Nothing! Basically he's just some asshole who somehow wants to do bad things.

There are many other things wrong with this movie. E.g.,

(4) Totally artificial and forced chemistry between Wolverine and pretty Japanese granddaughter.

I literally cringed whenever they hooked up.

(5) Jean Gray bad dreams BS was just LAME

I can think of only two things I liked about the movie: (A) The Nagasaki A-bomb scene. Pretty sick, think it's the first time I've seen it portrayed up-close in any movie. (B) The black ninjas, doing their thing in the middle of the night and flying across roof-tops.

Other than that this movie was total scheisse.

2 years ago

Maybe next time

3/10 I've wanted to see a wolverine movie that was fast paced, action packed, with a good storyline that would be well received by critics for the longest time. In my opinion wolverine is by far the most interesting of the x men characters. However this was not the wolverine I was waiting for. Yes it was action packed and I honestly enjoyed the fight scenes, but it was just shocking. This movie was flaw central. It saddens me to know that this was truly Hugh Jackmans last attempt at Wolverine, because we all know he's just too old for another attempt. And no one wants to see him as wolverine fighting off the bad guys at 45, it would be unbecoming. The characters in this story were ridiculous. I could tell from the moment they met that Wolverine was going to get with Mariko, but part of me just would not accept it, up until that fatal night when they kissed. A kiss which lacked any conviction or real passion, it was laughable. The oddest on screen couple I've seen since Matt Damon and Michael Douglas in Behind The Candelabra. They were painfully awkward. The arch villain serpant lady was atrocious. The ostentatious villain that we never even learn why or how she came about to work for Yashida with undiminishing loyalty, or what her general goal was. Yashida himself was a tedious villain and we didn't really here much about his life after Nagasaki. Mariko's father was a perpetual imbecile I could not fathom why he was even mentioned in the movie his character had no real significance. My favourite character had to have been Yuriko at least her motives were clear, Mariko was sort of a sister to her and it was obvious from the outset she wanted a slice of the wolverine pie. Now that couple would have at least been believable because she was bad ass and fearless. Her psychic powers were a bit ridiculous though she didn't really foresee anything worthwhile did she. The fight scenes were enjoyable though especially with the deadly ninja assassins creeping through the night, descending from rooftops and snapping necks like nobody's business. Yuriko was pretty sharp too, I was never really worried for her character, she could hold her own.... she had enough sass. It's a tragedy though I truly believe that Hugh Jackman was the perfect wolverine he just didn't get the movie he deserved. Well my advice is to wait a few years until the stench from this movie clears and then find a 20 year old Hugh Jackman doppelganger and create a Wolverine with some substance. It can't be that hard it has so much potential.

2 years ago

You know you are a bad director when:

3/10 You know you are a bad director when...

you negate the conclusion of the previous movie.

your plot makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

you have more plot inconsistencies than Swiss cheese.

your favorite X-men character fights and moves with the grace of a rock.

your favorite X-men character acts like a cretin and his decisions are abysmally bad.

your favorite X-men character loses his power more than half of the film.

your favorite X-men character cuts a tree with an axe and then gets tired.

you can cut adamantium.

you can drill into adamantium.

your adamantium cutter fails to cut flesh.

Japanese swords can withstand adamantium.

your villain is not even clownishly developed.

your villain has absolutely no motivation for how she acts. NONE. Worst villain ever.

your villain sheds her skin for no reason.

inexplicably you can suck a mutant of its power with a giant adamantium suit.

you kill a bear for no reason.

grandpa is a douche for the completely wrong reasons.

you take 50 rope arrows to your back and not try to get lose.

you have an awesome army of ninjas, yet in the end they decide to go on a sudden camping trip.

!!!!! you perform heart surgery on yourself, even if you can't heal back !!!!!

you don't pass out during heart surgery on yourself, but scream with excruciating pain when someone cuts your nails.

you live after performing heart surgery on yourself.

the best scene in the film is a scene after the credits.

you force a love relationship that is somehow immoral and has no meaning or conclusion.

your film has an ending without any conclusions; except Wolverine now has crappier claws.

You know you have a successful PR when:

people still pay to see this mess.

Be warned.

2 years ago

Plot Holes Galore

4/10 1. When Logan recovers from the atomic bomb blast, why does his hair grow back perfectly styled?

2. When he loses his healing ability and he extends his claws on the train, then retracts them, why do his knuckles instantly heal?

3. After Logan is shot several times in the chest, wouldn't the last thing he would want to do is go chop apart a huge fallen tree? Wouldn't his wounds open up and cause him to bleed to death?

4. It is very convenient that is Prometheus there was an alien removal machine and in Wolverine there was a color x-ray machine, but how could Logan operate on himself and reach to his heart to get the parasite? Beyond the fact that it would be awkward, beyond the fact that heart surgeons have to crack apart the ribs and then use a rib spreader, beyond the fact that his ribcage is saturated with adamantine, wouldn't the pain have caused him to black out?

5. If all Shingen had to do to get Logan's healing ability, wouldn't it have been easier for him to have drilled into his claws when he had him trapped in the chair, rather than building an adamantine transformer?

6. If Professor X found the ability to reintegrate his molecules like Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen, why didn't he fix his spine so that he didn't have to use the wheelchair anymore? And grow some hair on his head? (eh, you even gotta wonder why in the 24th Century, Jon Luc Picard never heard about Rogaine)

7. If only part of Logan's adamantine claws were chopped off, why do complete bone ones grow back? What happened to the partial metal ones?

The movie was far too long on ninja fight scenes. I was beginning to fall asleep. Sad that the bad guy turned out to be someone whose life he saved. The Viper character was just creepy without any definable reason for why he was even there.

All in all, it was a waste of bad popcorn.

2 years ago

Typical action mixed with a cheesy and illogical script

5/10 The Wolverine is OK at best, even with Hugh Jackman's usual superb acting. Most of the action is mediocre and offers no surprises (you can tell from the situation who is gonna die and who is gonna hit who several seconds before they do so) with the exception of a few really great scenes, but these scenes are scattered very far apart.

What really brings the movie down isn't its action though, but rather the culprit lies in the writing. Not only does it defy science and physics every chance it gets -{{SPOILER: A poor representation of an atomic bomb hitting Nagasaki is shown through a memory SPOILER OVER}}- , but the depictions of certain powers make you wonder if the writers even know how Wolverine's powers work. -{{SPOILER: At one point a guy in a robot samurai (Real Steel, anyone?)somehow manages to CUT Wolverine's adamantium claws with a heated blade, despite the fact that adamantium is supposed to be unbreakable, with the only material within the same zone of strength being vibranium (what Captain America's shield is made of). But the film never offers any sort of clarification or explanation to this. Added to this is that by somehow drilling into his bones, the man in the suit gets younger as if he got Logan's healing factor (even though that's not how it works), yet a few seconds later he gets stabbed and his supposed healing power does nothing anymore? SPOILER OVER}}-

The character writing is poor and very 2-dimensional for everyone other than Logan, and so many developmental/emotional moments are thrown at you so fast that you don't have time to grab onto any of them. It's like there was a bag full of typical Hollywood ideas that the movie just flung on-top of the script.

Build onto this is a predictable and lazy script with a few cheap jokes and a forced romance, and you have a movie that does little more than half-entertain you. And to add to this, the after credits scene makes NO sense (powers wise) and backtracks/negates important aspects from the last movie, which is a very childish and unprofessional thing to do, even if the last movie was quite bad. The people at Marvel need to simply accept their mistake and move on, rather than try to dwell on things that people enjoyed from their first 2 successful X-Men movies.

However, people always overate movies when they first come out, especially for Marvel, so the rating you see here is probably not the one you would give it. But if you're willing to deny several of the things you thought you knew for an hour and a half to be sorta entertained, then you shouldn't have much of a problem for this movie. If not, i recommend reading the plot instead to get ready for the next movie.